


The Only Thing I Hear Is You

by QueenTheatrics



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Case Fic, Detective Work, F/M, Introspection, Kidnapping, i dont really know what this is, not of amy or jake, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-24
Updated: 2016-06-24
Packaged: 2018-07-17 23:21:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7290172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenTheatrics/pseuds/QueenTheatrics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The little girl goes missing on a Wednesday. Jake and Amy work to find her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Only Thing I Hear Is You

**Author's Note:**

> This has been in the pipeline for months and I hope it is enjoyable to you all. Note: I know nothing about crime or police work so just pretend what I wrote isn't nonsense.

The little girl is kidnapped on a Wednesday, right before lunch. Amy's stomach rumbles through initial interviews, through taking statements, through investigating the crime scene, but she can't tell if the churning in her gut is from hunger or horror.

Jake sweeps the scene from top to toe with a grim determination, but comes up empty. Amy looks to him for reassurance and instead sees pure devastation; though he schools his expression as soon as he realises she's looking at him, she's sure she just witnessed naked, unadulterated, soul crushing guilt start to wind it's way into Jake's system.  
"Most crimes are solved in the first 48 hours," she says, sounding a lot more confident than she really is. "Give it until Friday. We'll find her."

They don't find her.

———————————————————————————————————————

Sometimes, in times like these, Amy wonders what it would be like to be someone else—not that she would ever want to be, but when her mind wanders, it tends to veer in completely the opposite direction than she expects. She thinks about being a child, careless and full of joy. She thinks about being a man, with white skin and grey hair, and a practiced sneer that says "I own you". None of these realities appeal to her, but they seem easier, somehow. Quieter. They’re realities that aren't filled with photographs of a girl kidnapped, likely dead, waiting to be moved from the unsolved side of the board to the other. As she gazes at the pictures, the pictures of the case and the crime and the _child_ that is her responsibility, Amy wonders what it would be like to live a different life. She doesn’t act on her thoughts, but she can’t deny they’re there, because her life is complicated enough as it is, because she suffers from anxiety and bouts of terrible rage, because she has peaks and troughs and spikes and declines like waves crashing to the shore.  
It’s never occurred to Jake to be anything but completely, unabashedly himself. Jake has never been one to do things by halves, and it's one of the best and worst things about him. It's what makes him a great detective, it's what makes him a caring and thoughtful boyfriend, it's what makes him forego sleep for three days in order to try and find a missing girl who's disappeared without a trace. And that's the thing: Jake is consistent. Jake is dialled to eleven all the time, but that high, that ridiculous, unattainable level of excitement, for Jake, is one smooth, unbroken line.  
Amy loves Jake with everything she has, but she envies him with an ache that penetrates her erratic soul, because while Jake may be safe at the eye of the storm, she's caught in the tumultuous sea.  


———————————————————————————————————————

Jake thinks that the father did it. Jake is sure that the father did it. Jake would be willing to stake his badge and his reputation and his whole goddamn apartment on it, because it's always the parents that did it. Jake loves Amy, but in this moment he doesn't like her, because Amy says things like, "there's no evidence that it was the father," and "you need more than just a hunch to bring him in," and even, insultingly, "your last hunch turned out to be wrong, Jake, and look where that got us."  
Jake knows that she isn't trying to hurt him.  
Amy is trying to help him solve the case. Amy is trying to help him see things from a different angle. Amy is trying to avoid him jumping to conclusions and blinding himself to the answer.  
Amy's just trying to stop him getting fired. 

Jake tells Amy she's being a bad partner. Amy tells Jake he has daddy issues. 

———————————————————————————————————————

Jake stops trusting his father when he's seven, and he comes home from school to find his mother on the couch in tears, clutching a damp note from his father that just says _'I'm leaving'_. He doesn't stop loving him, never, ever could, but the sight of his mother, broken and small, never leaves his head, and he loves her all the more fiercely. 

Jake's father is kind of his hero, because he flies planes and dresses well and always knows exactly what to say, but he's his hero in a way that's unattainable for any mortal man.  
Jake has these ideas about him and in his head they stick, because Jake's father has never been around long enough to disprove them—until he is, and he does.  
Jake's father comes back into his life with a whistle and a grin and a bang. He brings with him a pilot's hat and too many memories, and Jake takes one in exchange for the other. Jake thinks about family, he thinks about forgiveness, he thinks about second chances, and then he stops thinking and turns on his heel, turns his back to the door and his back to his father, and doesn't look behind him when he turns the corner.  
As he walks away, Jake waits to feel sorry for him. He waits to feel anything for him at all. 

———————————————————————————————————————

They go back to the crime scene and look around the house, which is clean and tidy and cold like a museum. The victim's father, who has a strong jaw and dark eyebrows, reminds Jake a lot of his own, so he lets Amy interview him instead. He's flighty and irresponsible and just a little cocky, and doesn't seem quite sure how he's supposed to act in a situation like this. Amy can forgive him for that; nobody should have to know.

They stand on the street afterwards, side by side, and Jake raises a hand to block out the sun. He clears his throat, awkwardly, and scratches the back of his neck.  
"Did he remind you-"  
"Of your dad? Yeah," Amy says, not looking at him. She’s staring straight ahead down the road, squinting just slightly as the sun hits her sunglasses. "I don't think he did it, though."  
"I still think he did," Jake sighs, straining his neck to see what she's staring at.  
"Look," she suddenly says. She points at the house across the road from the victim’s, which has an unkempt front garden, filled with wildflowers, and garish green curtains in the window. "The neighbour said she didn't see anything because she was sunbathing in her garden. But the kidnap happened around this time, and the garden is shaded by the house." She turns to him with a calculating grin on her face. "Seems like a weird thing to lie about, right?"

As it turns out, the neighbour did see something: a van. But since the van bore her son's company logo, she hadn't wanted to get him involved. Amy is genuinely shocked that someone would lie to the police during an investigation about a child kidnap, and she berates the woman thoroughly and at length. The woman doesn’t seem to care, which frustrates Amy more.

They leave the house with a contact number and address for the son, and more questions than answers.

———————————————————————————————————————

Amy's never been good at lying. Growing up, she had seven older brothers to get in worse trouble than she could ever dream of, and at least three of those brothers would tell the lie for her so she wouldn't have to. Her father's dark, kind eyes, sparkling with humour and lined with crow's feet, would come down to her level, and the truth would be spilling out before she knew what hit her. Amy doesn't like disappointing people, and lying always feels like she is.  
Jake, on the other hand, grew up with Gina, and Amy isn't sure if Gina actually remembers how to tell the truth at this point. Jake can spin a tale at the drop of a hat, and his poker face, when he needs it, is surprisingly good. Jake loves stories and fantasies and making up characters with ridiculously complicated back stories. Jake didn't have a father with dark, kind eyes, or an army of brothers to lie for him. Jake had his wits and his brain and his big, big mouth, and he got by with those as best he could. 

———————————————————————————————————————

They interview the grandparents, and it goes about as well as everything else has gone so far. The grandfather is rude and the grandmother is cold, and all they get out of them is what they already know, before they are all but kicked out of the house.

Jake stares at the glass front door of the house, jaw clenched, Amy standing beside him. She has a hand on his shoulder, and there's silence, broken only by the sounds of a lawnmower two houses over. The smell of damp grass hits their noses and Amy feels like she can't breathe.  
"I don't think they did it," She says, finally.  
Jake says nothing as they walk back to the car.

———————————————————————————————————————

Amy's grandparents were cops, all four of them. Amy's parents were cops—that’s how they met. All of Amy's brothers are cops, except for Cedro, who is a firefighter, and the family disappointment. Amy's family is warm and crowded and loving, and shop-talk is home-talk, and no one can get a word in edge ways, and sometimes there aren't enough potatoes to go around, but everyone has a space, and there is always room for more. 

That room she was in, with their girl's grandparents? Amy's never felt more claustrophobic in her life.

———————————————————————————————————————

The neighbour's son turns out to be on a whole new level of creepy. He has pale, darting eyes which follow her every movement, and a smile on his face that's too cold to be comforting. He looks Amy up and down when he opens the door, looks at her police jacket and sensible shoes, her hair pulled back in a neat bun, and tells her she needs to loosen up, that she's too pretty to be a cop, that she looks great riding in a police car but would look even better riding somewhere else. Jake's hand is shaking where he holds his pen, but he looks to Amy, allows her to indicate how she wants to proceed. Amy, ever professional, just asks her questions, and repeats them until he gives her answers that aren't a half disguised innuendo or just blatantly vulgar. Jake is one step behind, his hand on his truncheon, and he wouldn't kill the guy, not really, but he is beginning to think that intact kneecaps are too good for misogynistic assholes.  
But Amy doesn't want him to act, so he doesn't. He plays the part of dutiful second perfectly, because he's learning, he really is, not to take over. He smiles, and nods, and breathes hard through his nose, and his dentist (Amy's dentist, who he now goes to) will shout at him for teeth grinding, but he will not betray Amy's trust or question her judgement. Still, if it's hard for _him_ to deal with the way the guy's eyes slide over her form, he can't even imagine what she must be feeling. 

He waits until they're outside with the mid-morning sun beating down on their backs to say, "Want me to arrest him?" Amy just scoffs and takes a drag at her cigarette. She blows smoke rings into the air and tries not to notice the way Jake stands upwind of her, just far enough away for the smell not to hit him. This is her first in a fortnight, and she's rationing her last packet. When they're gone, they're gone. She gives a sigh, smoke curling from her lips and into the hazy air like a whisper in a crowd.  
"I don't think he did it, Jake," she says, and he looks a little sad, a little angry, a little bit manic behind those eyes.  
"Yeah, me neither, but he's a total creep!" He says, wound so tight she thinks he might snap like a big rubber band. "I'm sure we could find something to lock him away for."  
"That's corruption, Jake." She says, shaking her head. The cigarette is almost finished, and she savours the last few draws. "That's literally police corruption."  
"Whatever, party pooper." He replies, grinning, but his smile doesn't quite reach his eyes, and she reaches out to grab his hand, cigarette butt dangling from her lips.  
"Thank you for trying to help, but I can handle misogynistic jerks by myself," She squeezes his fingers, grounding and firm. He squeezes back. The cigarette butt falls to the ground and is crushed under her heel.  
"Ohhh, I _know_ you can." He says, with the smallest huff of a laugh. "But you deal with it every day, let me take one for a change." The smile she gives him is winning, beaming with half-felt relief and gratitude. Amy really loves Jake because Jake knows she's tough, but he also knows that thick skin doesn't make the words of rude jerks hurt any less.

———————————————————————————————————————

In high school, Amy meets a boy who tells her she's too pretty to be on the debate team, so she tells him he needs to back up his arguments with statistics and substantiated facts. He just laughs and asks her to prom, and though it doesn't feel right, she thinks it would feel worse to go alone. On the way back, he stops his car on a deserted road and sticks his hand up her skirt with a leering grin, so she breaks his wrist and walks three miles home in five inch heels. The blisters are worth it. She cries a lot that night, silently in the bathroom, with her trembling wrist caught between her teeth to stifle the sounds and a towel jammed under the crack in the door.  
The next day, the boy shows up at her house with roses; she doesn't even open the door all the way to tell him to get lost. He looks at her with sad, hungry eyes, and throws the flowers to the ground. At school, he tells everyone she's a prude, and the rumour spreads like wildfire, and the boy never looks at her again. But in the end he doesn't matter, because she didn't ever love him enough to regret losing him.

———————————————————————————————————————

The son's alibi checks out, and he has multiple businesses with a fleet of vans each, which means they're back to square one. They canvas the neighbours again, and end up watching six hours of dashcam footage in an attempt to place anyone—and at this point, they'd go for anyone—at the scene of the crime on the day of. All they see are some particularly bad driving habits, and some graphic footage of two cats fighting in the middle of the road, and then Amy yells "PAUSE!" So loudly Jake's sure his eardrum bursts.  
"Ames!" He exclaims, clutching his head. She doesn't even apologise. Instead, she pushes him out of the way and backs up the video a few frames. Jake has to squint to see what she's talking about, but eventually he spots it: in the corner of the screen, half obscured by a tree, is a large figure with thick calves in black hauling a squirming figure towards a van, and in tiny, fuzzy writing, she can just make out the last three letters of a license plate.  
"Run a check," she says, frantic. "Those three letters in all the vans that guy owns."  
"Already on it," he says.  
The numbers and letters run over the screen like raindrops chasing down down a window. Amy tries to keep up but it makes her eyes hurt, so she just examines her chipped fingernails until the computer gives a beep to tell them it's finished. Three vans across six companies that end in those three letters. Sixty different people who have access to those three vans. They reference and cross reference until their eyes go numb, but try as they might, they can't find a connection between the van drivers and the family. Amy deflates like a stuck balloon. At this point, Jake can't even offer pacifying words of encouragement. He just traces the veins in her wrist with his index finger and keeps staring at the list until the words blur. 

———————————————————————————————————————

Amy Santiago doesn't fail. Amy Santiago can't fail.  
Amy Santiago thinks that if she fails, she might forget how to breathe. 

———————————————————————————————————————

The girl's friends are quiet and terrified and Amy doesn't have a clue how to talk to them. Jake does. He sits on the floor with them, cross legged, and they are drawn to him, like moths to a flame. They touch his shiny badge and he shows them his note book, and they all write their names in shaky block capitals in the front cover with a crayon. In a voice that is calming and kind, Jake coaxes what happened at school the day of the kidnap from the three tiny girls, who tell him in high, quivering voices that Leah hadn't come into school that day, but that she had told them her uncle was taking her out.  
_("No known siblings for either parent, Jake."_  
_"Well, that's another angle busted.")_  
Jake thanks them for helping and lets them try on his jacket, which scrapes the floor as they chase each other, giggles echoing around the room. On his face, Amy spots a quiet smile, and sees a kind of wistfulness sparkling in his eyes. Jake is good with kids- has always been good with kids, and the people who scoff at him for it are most often the ones who are jealous because they're not. He talks to kids like they're people, because he knows that they are.  
Everyone always asks her if she gets broody when kids come into the station, if she suddenly decides that now is the time for her to pack up and start having babies. She just smiles at that, an enigmatic smile, and doesn't tell them that, yeah, she likes kids, and she'd love some of her own some day, but Jake's the one whose eyes light up when he talks to them, who right now looks like he might cry from the pure raw emotion of holding three young girls who have insisted on hugging him before they go. She doesn't tell them about the way he watches their backs as they leave, with a look of sadness gracing his features. As though he senses she's watching him, his eyes dart up at her, and his smile widens, minutely, and like that, the look is gone. 

———————————————————————————————————————

Jake tells everyone that Die Hard is what made him want to become a cop, but Amy knows that's not quite true. On their first stakeout together, when Jake had long since stopped trying to impress her with gruesome cop stories, and Amy had started to notice the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled, he told her, with his long fingers circling a cup of tar-black coffee, the real story. He says, his voice hitching and starting like the car he loves so much, that when he was six, his dad forgot to pick him up from school. As he sat on the wall by the school gates, two cops saw him and sat down. They chatted to him until his tears had dried, and then walked him all the way home, with one of his hands clasped in each of theirs. That's the story he tells her, with soft vulnerable eyes and a mouth pulled into a half-grin. Looking back, Amy isn't sure she didn't fall a little bit in love with him right there. 

———————————————————————————————————————

After they've interviewed the kids, Jake disappears for a while. Amy knows him well enough to realise that he needs some time alone, but she also knows that too much and he'll lose himself inside his own head. She finds him half an hour later in the file room, hiding between the stacks.  
"Hey," she says, sliding down the wall to the floor beside him, her thigh pressed against his. He's warm beside her, the point of contact burning her skin despite two layers of clothes.  
"Hey," he replies. He doesn't look at her. His eyes are trained on the paper he's rustling between his fingers.  
"Can I ask you something?" She says, and gets a non-committal grunt in reply. "Why is this case affecting you so much?" He looks up then, face expressionless, and she feels the need to explain herself. "I know it's awful, and it makes me sick to think about it, but it seems like... You're taking it to heart."  
Jake takes a deep, shaky breath, and that scares her more than anything he could have said. His hand finds hers and squeezes it, grounding.  
"When I was about nine, a kid on my street went missing." Is how his story starts, and he looks like the words are forcing their way out of his body, like he couldn't stop them if he tried. "They looked for him for weeks. They had dogs and helicopters and everything. They found him a month later at the bottom of the East river. I can't-" he chokes slightly and looks away from her, but she can see the tears forming at the corners of his eyes. "I can't let anyone else go through that." He swipes his thumb across the corner of his lip, and she can practically hear his mind working.  
"It won't come to that, Jake." She says, quietly, because she doesn't know what else to do. For someone who prides herself on having all the answers, she spends a lot of her time uncertain. She digs her chin into his shoulder and he presses a kiss into her hair, and there are no words between them for a long time after that.  
Eventually, Jake swallows, his throat bobbing, and shows her the photograph of the boy he has in his hand. He was a tiny kid with deep red curls and big glasses. In the photograph with him is a young Jake Peralta, looking completely different and exactly the same, with an ear splitting grin on his face and grass stains on his t-shirt. Suddenly, without warning, Jake chokes back a strangled sob.  
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he says, frantically rubbing his eyes.  
"Hey, babe." She grabs his hands and pulls them into her lap, and turns his face towards hers. "What are you sorry for?"  
"I shouldn't be reacting like this. It's not helping." He looks at her with big, round eyes, tears brimming over onto his cheeks.  
"Hey, this?" She indicates his tears, thumbing one from his cheek before it hits his chin. "This is a perfectly normal reaction." He goes to scoff, but she squeezes his chin in one hand, keeping his gaze trained on her so he knows she's serious. "It doesn't make you weird, or wrong. It just makes you a person."

———————————————————————————————————————

Amy lives and breathes nothing but the case for two weeks. No breakthrough. No leads. No hope. She pushes herself to breaking point and beyond in her waking hours, and at night, when she and Jake are stealing what little sleep they can catch, they cling to each other, frantically, desperately. Amy sees nothing during these precious few hours. Her mind is blank, filled with terrifying, consuming black. Jake dreams. He dreams of dirty white vans and dappled sunlight, faceless children lying face down in mud. He dreams of cold hands, twisted limbs, broken bones, and blood, flowing like a scarlet river through his mind.  
Jake dreams that they find the little girl, but they’re too late, and even though it’s only minutes, seconds, even, that they lose, the girl is dead by the time they get there. He wakes up with a gasp and a yell, and gives Amy one long, terror-stricken look, before sprinting down the hallway to the bathroom to throw up. Amy follows him, trailing the pads of her fingers along the wallpaper, the door frame, every ridge of his spine, counting each knot in his back in a soft, soothing tone, like the low hum of an aeroplane. Eventually Jake’s breathing matches with hers, slow and steady and even, and his shoulders stop shaking. She flushes the toilet and helps him up. Jake is the little spoon when they get back into bed.

———————————————————————————————————————

Soon, it's been a month, and Jakes shows up at her door, looking lost, looking younger, looking more like the Jake she saw in that photograph than ever before. His face is sagging from lack of sleep, and with drooping eyelids and slumped shoulders, he trudges into her apartment. The next day, tired and grumpy, they make their way into the precinct and Amy intercepts a call about suspicious activity down by the East River. She takes a Rosa and a dog but leaves Jake behind, and is glad that she does when the dog whines and growls and digs up a body.  
Later, Holt claps her on the shoulder and says, with a face as still as stone, "Well done, detective," and Amy feels her skin go cold as she stands. Because, see, Amy would do anything for Holt to look at her like she's doing something right, and she knows that it's wrong, she knows that it's unsustainable, she knows that eventually something will have to give. But to have Holt praise her when she's just found a body - the body of a _child_ , Jesus Christ - feels incredibly hollow.

She tells Jake over lunch, tells him everything about the river and the body, and watches grimly as his fork barely slows on its way to his mouth. He chews carefully and swallows. He doesn't say anything. Later, as he sleeps on her couch with his head in her lap, she runs her fingers through his hair and looks at the photograph of Jake and his friend, and makes a silent promise to herself and anyone else who's listening that she will bring this child peace. 

The DNA test hasn't come in yet. It might not be their girl.

———————————————————————————————————————

Jake loves a pizza place because it reminds him of his dad and his apartment because it reminds him of his grandma. Jake is still attached to a kid he once knew, 25 years after the kid disappeared. Jake has never met their girl but Amy just knows she's the only important thing to him right now, the only thought in his head from morning to night.  
Amy's known Jake for years, and loved him for almost as many, and she's watched him love and lose and love again, and yet never seem beaten down. Jake is resilient, Jake is determined, Jake always bounces back. And yet, she can't help but worry that this might be the one thing he can't bounce back from. She watches him wear his heart on his sleeve and his thoughts on his face and she's struck, as always, by just how different they are.

Jake loves Amy like being in freefall, with the rush of the wind on a constant loop in his ears. Jake loves like it's a competition, wholeheartedly and single-mindedly, without any thought for the consequences. Amy has always loved with an asterisk, no less deeply than Jake but without the crippling blindness her partner possesses. She falls in love with him carefully and quietly, like something in her just drops right into place.  
But Amy has a blind spot and it's shaped just like Jake, and it leaves her vulnerable in a way she's never allowed herself to be. And Amy loves Jake, loves him like burning, but the tiniest part of her soul that somehow shouts the loudest is screaming warnings in her ear, because though Jake's love is thankless and asks for nothing in return, he would only have to look at her the right way and she would give and give and give until there was nothing left of her but dust.

———————————————————————————————————————

It's not their girl.

Amy doesn't know whether to breathe a sigh of relief or cry with frustration. She thanks the Lord and anyone else she can think of that its not their girl, because no body means she could still be alive. But no body means they're no further forward, means another day has gone past without a lead. The body is transferred to the 98, where another family promptly identifies it, and Amy feels worse than ever before. 

Amy looks for leads and looks for suspects; she looks for their girl, and the trail is growing colder every day. She looks and looks and looks. Amy looks for hope and she looks for fear and she ends up seeing nothing at all.  
So she goes back to the beginning. She starts again. She redoes all her interviews and looks for discrepancies. And just as she's about to give up, she and Jake come across the father in his garden, talking to a large man with huge biceps and a weird sort of grimace on his face. The man sees her and leaves with a sneer at Jake and a strange half salute to her, which she just ignores. The father is kneeling in the soil with a mucky towel slung over his shoulder. His face is covered in streaks of earth. He looks... Busy.  
"Who was that?" Amy asks the father, and he gives a casual, one shouldered shrug.  
"Leah's uncle," he replies.  
"You didn't mention you had a brother," Amy says, sharply, flipping through her notebook.  
"Nah, he's," the guy sort of stutters, rubbing a hand over his head. "He's her godfather, but she calls him uncle. My best friend from college."  
She swallows, throat dry, and then quickly goes over the questions she had to ask. Soon, she makes an excuse to leave and walks to her car in a state of shock, Jake following two steps behind her.  
Leah's uncle. His best friend from college. A tall, stocky man with strong arms and thick calves. How could she be so stupid?  
She starts off shocked. And then she gets mad. The anger inside her is fast and terrifying and she doesn't know how to make it stop, so she stops thinking because it's making her brain hurt, and acts instead.  
She and Rosa follow the uncle after he finishes work that day and watch him make all kinds of weird stops, to the hardware store for a large plastic tub, to the supermarket for energy bars and bleach, to the post office for a lumpy looking parcel that he tucks under one arm. 

To say Jake takes it badly is an understatement. He flicks through the photos she took, swearing loudly at each one. Rosa and Gina have a standing bet going about how many times Jake will swear in a day. Amy's pretty sure Gina has won every time. She's also sure the prize is sexual favours, and that's why the pair are disappearing at midday at least three times a week. 

As soon as they're done looking through the photos, they track down the guy's last known location, throw on their jackets and head out to the car. With the GPS on Amy's phone, they drive out of the city and along empty, narrow roads to their destination. Amy takes deep breaths, in and out, and prays to a God she's not sure she believes in that it will all be over soon. She opens her eyes when the car stops, and the tinny voice on her phone tells them they've arrived.

———————————————————————————————————————

In the end, it was the father that did it. Jake figures it out with a downward turn to his mouth and doesn't say anything except "it's always the father that did it" as they get out of the car outside an old, empty warehouse, and see a familiar white van and the car that's been parked in the father's driveway since day one. The uncle, accomplice and muscle, was tagging along for the ride. The neighbour's son had nothing to do with it. He was just creepy.

The fight- if you could call it that - is over quickly once it's established that Jake and Amy have guns and another five cops on the way, and all the two men have are strong wills and energy bars. Amy almost cries when they finally find their girl, locked in a room without windows or light. She's pale and lethargic when Jake picks her up, and Amy stays close to them all the way to the car. They hand the two guys over to the other officers with a sneer. She resists the urge to yell at them as they're pushed through the door of the car.

———————————————————————————————————————

Under the fluorescent lights of the interview room, the father's sallow skin looks even more sickly than before. Amy feels like she can almost see through it like rice paper, right past his bones and into his skull. If you could see hateful thoughts, Amy thinks this guy would have a whole wall of them dedicated to her branded on his forehead. She looks away from his eyes and focuses her gaze on his dark hair, slicked right back with gel, and then his hands, with short, thick fingers and dirty fingernails.  
"Why'd you do it?" Amy says, casually, leaning back in her chair. Jake watches from the other side of the glass with Holt, silently cheering her on.  
"My wife wants a divorce, but she wants full custody of Leah." The father grunts. He goes to scratch his face and the handcuffs rattle. Amy keeps her eyes on them at all times.  
"So instead of taking it to court, you... Kidnapped your own daughter?" She says, and Jake actually laughs out loud at the incredulity in her voice. Holt's mouth moves the tiniest fraction. Jake is counting that in his monthly smile tally.  
"Sounds stupid when you put it like that." The dad mutters at the table.  
"Pretty sure it would sound stupid no matter which way I put it, _Dan_ ," she replies, folding her arms. "Where'd you get the van?"  
"Oh, yeah, Cal stole that." He shrugs. "Some workman left it running across the street from his house. Thought it'd be safer than using our own cars."  
"Stole it. Of course. Why not?" Amy is exhausted and angry and frustrated, and running on less than four hours sleep and only one cup of coffee since breakfast. But still, she resists the urge to scream and yell, to tell the guy exactly what she thinks of him, because Jake has already destroyed a bunch of mugs on the roof and at least one of them has to keep their cool. Plus, she's at least 90% sure the captain is watching through the glass and she's desperate in her soul for a well done that doesn't involve a dead body.

She wraps up the interview and transfers the guy to holding, and sits with their girl while they wait for her mother. She sits between Jake and Amy, her head on Jake's arm and one small hand fisted in the fabric of Amy's shirt, eyes fluttering closed as the weight of everything hits her. Amy looks over at Jake and gives him a small smile, which he returns, gladly. 

A gasp and a short cry alert them to the arrival of the girl's mother. Leah runs to her, arms outstretched, tired and frightened but delighted. The mother grabs her around the waist and the girl clings to her like a limpet, and the pair of them fall to the floor in the middle of the precinct with tears of joy running down their faces. To them, in that moment, no one else exists in the world. 

Amy looks to Jake, the only person she's ever met who can make her feel like that, and finds he's already staring at her. She stands, and so does he, and she turns to him and snakes her arms around his waist, under his jacket, presses her palms flat against the small of his back. His arms circle her, fingers pressing to her neck, her back, never laying still. She feels him swallow as her forehead presses into the hollow of his throat, and she can't help but wonder if he's got taller or if the weight of this case has permanently altered the shape of her spine, causing her to lose height as well as vital hours of sleep. When she voices this thought, Jake just chuckles, and she can feel the vibrations tingling all the way down her spine.

———————————————————————————————————————

The little girl goes home on a Wednesday, right after lunch. So do Jake and Amy, with the weight of the sky lifted from their shoulders for the first time in weeks. Jake gives her a lazy kiss as they cross the threshold of her apartment, with a slow smile on his face that ignites something deep in her belly. She entwines her fingers with his, pulls him bodily down the corridor to the bedroom. He stops in the doorway and she turns to him, eyebrows knitting together. He brings her hand to his lips.  
"Hey, what about all that paperwork we have to do?" He murmurs, lips fighting a smile, teeth grazing the pulse point in her wrist. She pulls him to her, puts his hands on her waist, breathes in his scent as he kisses her hair, and then struggles to fight back a yawn. He grins at her, eyelids drooping, and leads her to the bed. Her head hits the pillows, and she feels him above her, around her, warm and solid and there, _there_ like a constant, like Terry's yoghurt and Boyle's weird lunches and the fact that Amy loves Jake _so much_.  
"Tomorrow." She says, curling into him, and it feels like a promise whispered into his skin. Tomorrow Jake will rise early and so will she, and they'll save the city together one case at a time. Tomorrow the precinct will be exactly where they left it, and they'll wade through paperwork mountain together, hand in hand. Tomorrow Jake could drag her to the ends of the earth and she'd hope they were only halfway done. Tomorrow, anything might happen, but right now, she just wants to sleep.


End file.
